Militants Overrun Mosul

Sam I think your sarcasm meter is off.

 

Good news. The Iraqi army appears to have won a major victory against DAESH and has retaken Ramadi. Mosul will be the next goal.

What is even better news is that the Iraqi army appears to have figured things out to be both an effective fighting force not purely driven by sectarian goals. This has also been done too without having the US put a lot of boots on the ground.

http://news.yahoo.com/iraqi-army-prepares-final-push-ramadi-islamic-state-101032461.html

Iraqi army declares first major victory over Islamic State in Ramadi

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's army declared victory over Islamic State fighters in a provincial capital west of Baghdad on Sunday, the first major triumph for the U.S.-trained force since it collapsed in the face of an assault by the militants 18 months ago.

The capture of Ramadi, capital of mainly Sunni-Muslim Anbar province in the Euphrates River valley west of the capital, deprives Islamic State militants of their biggest prize of 2015. The fighters seized it in May after government troops fled in a defeat which prompted Washington to take a hard look at strategy in its ongoing air war against the militants.

After encircling the city for weeks, the Iraqi military launched a campaign to retake it last week, and made a final push to seize the central administration complex on Sunday.

"By controlling the complex this means that we have defeated them in Ramadi," said Sabah al-Numani, a spokesman for the force leading the fight on the government side. "The next step is to clear pockets that could exist here or there in the city."

State television broadcast footage of troops, Humvee vehicles and tanks advancing through Ramadi streets amid piles of rubble and collapsed houses. Some districts appeared to have been completely destroyed by the advance.

A U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the U.S.-led campaign against Islamic State was unable to confirm at this point whether the militants had been cleared out of the government complex.

Television also showed nighttime celebrations in mainly Shi'ite cities south of Baghdad for the victory in Anbar, with people dancing in the streets and waving Iraqi flags from cars.

Officials did not give any immediate death tolls for the battle. The government says most civilians were able to evacuate before it launched its assault.

Anbar provincial council member Falih al-Essawi called on the government to restore services to Ramadi quickly and start rebuilding the city to allow the return of the displaced.

"It will not be easy to convince families to return to a city that lacks basic human needs," he told Reuters.

Islamic State, also known by the acronyms ISIS, ISIL or Daesh, swept through a third of Iraq in June 2014 and declared a "caliphate" to rule over all Muslims from territory in both Iraq and Syria, carrying out mass killings and imposing a draconian form of Islam.

Its rise was aided by the swift collapse of the Iraqi army, which abandoned city after city, leaving fleets of armored vehicles and other American weapons in the fighters' hands.

Since then, the battle against the group in both countries has drawn in most global and regional powers, often with competing allies on the ground in complex multi-sided civil wars.

A U.S.-led coalition is waging an air campaign against Islamic State, but rebuilding the Iraqi army to the point that it could recapture and hold territory has been one of the biggest challenges.

In previous battles, including the recapture of former dictator Saddam Hussein's home city Tirkit in April, the Iraqi government relied on Iran-backed Shi'ite militias for ground fighting, with its own army mainly in a supporting role.

COMPLETE CONTROL

Ramadi was the first major city recaptured by the army itself, without relying on the militias, who were kept off the battlefield to avoid sectarian tension with the mainly Sunni population.

The government, led by a Shi'ite Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, said Ramadi would be handed over to local police and a Sunni tribal force once it was secured, a measure meant to win over the community to the fight against Islamic State.

"We have trained hundreds of tribal fighters, their role will be holding the ground," said Brigadier-General Yahya Rasool, spokesman for the joint operations command.

"Seeing their own tribes responsible for security will be a relief for the civilians" and will help convince those who have been displaced to return to the city, he added.

The strategy echoes the "surge" campaign fought by U.S. forces in 2006-2007 against a precursor of Islamic State, when Washington also relied on winning over local Sunni tribes and arming them to fight militants. Anbar province, including Ramadi, was one of the main battlefields during that campaign at the height of the 2003-2011 U.S. Iraq war.

The government said the next target after Ramadi will be the northern city of Mosul, by far the largest population center controlled by Islamic State in either Iraq or Syria.

"The smooth victory in Ramadi should be happy news for the residents of Mosul," spokesman Numani said. U.S. officials had hoped Baghdad would launch an assault on Mosul during 2015, but this was put off after the fighters swept into Ramadi in May.

Dislodging the militants from Mosul, which had a pre-war population close to 2 million, would effectively abolish their state structure in Iraq and deprive them of a major source of funding, which comes partly from oil and partly from fees and taxes on residents.

(Reporting by Ahmed Rasheed; Writing by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by Peter Graff)

 

This is still a very slow process with a lot of uncertainty but I think the tide is turning against DAESH. Strikes by Allied forces and Russia are taking a toll particularly on oil facilities cutting into their financing. Assad forces, Syrian rebel forces and most important the Iraqi army are becoming more competent on the battlefield while there are reports of DAESH morale dropping.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...d6c8e4-c6a7-11e5-b933-31c93021392a_story.html

BEIRUT — The Islamic State’s recent defeats on the battlefield signal that its once-vaunted militia army has been hobbled by worsening money problems, desertions and a dwindling pool of fighters, analysts and monitoring groups say.

U.S.-backed Kurdish and Arab forces have seized significant amounts of territory from the extremist group in the parts of Iraq and Syria where it declared a caliphate in 2014. Those losses are linked to the group’s struggles to pay fighters and recruit new ones to replace those who have deserted, defected to other militant groups or died on the battlefield, the analysts say.

“These issues suggest that as an entity that is determined to hold onto territory, the Islamic State is not sustainable,” said Jacob Shapiro, an expert on the Islamic State who teaches politics at Princeton University.

Only a year ago, the Islamic State was seen as a juggernaut — rich, organized and fielding thousands of motivated fighters — that overran rival forces in Iraq and Syria with astonishing speed and brutality.

But in recent months, its momentum has been reversed.

U.S. military officials estimate that the group has lost as much as 40 percent of the territory it held in Iraq and as much as 20 percent in Syria. Kurdish and Arab forces, including Iraq’s increasingly competent military, have advanced against the group with the help of airstrikes from a U.S.-led coalition.

The air raids have damaged the Islamic State’s oil infrastructure, a key revenue source, and the territorial setbacks have stripped the group of populations to tax and assets to seize, analysts say. All of this, they say, appears to have forced the group to reduce salaries and benefits for fighters.

Few expect a sudden defeat of the conservative Sunni group, known for its resilience and ability to surprise its opponents. It also will probably continue exploiting sectarian grievances that have helped it gain loyalty, albeit sometimes tenuous, from the largely Sunni populations under its control, an issue that has made it difficult to defeat the group.

Moreover, the suspension on Wednesday of U.N.-backed peace talks in Geneva to end the Syrian war may complicate international efforts to fight the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL. The United States and Russia back opposing sides in the conflict but have nevertheless supported the talks because of concern that the fighting, which has killed more than 250,000 people and displaced millions, is empowering the Islamic State.

Yet there appears to be a rise in the number of Islamic State fighters who have deserted or, in the case of the Syrian conflict, defected to other militant groups, said Vera Mironova, an expert on armed groups in Syria and Iraq at Harvard University’s Belfer Center. The salary and benefit cuts have caused “for-profit militants” in Syria to increasingly “look for better deals” with other armed factions, she said.

The group, she added, also is struggling to replenish ranks of its foreign fighters, who tend to be more ideologically driven but also die in relatively large numbers on the battlefield. Tighter border restrictions imposed by Turkey have slowed the flow of fighters into neighboring Syria, said Mironova, whose research has involved hundreds of interviews with militants who are fighting in Syria and Iraq.

“They’re in big trouble,” Mironova said, referring to the Islamic State’s ability to fight.

Members of the Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently group, which monitors the Islamic State, say a rising number of foreign members of the militant group have requested help to flee Syria. The requests have been made secretly because the Islamic State regularly executes foreigners who attempt to escape, said a co-founder of the Syrian monitoring group, Mohammed Saleh, who like other members uses a nom de guerre because of threats from the militants.

“There are lots of these people who are desperately trying to flee, and not just from Raqqa,” he said, referring to the city in eastern Syria that is the Islamic State’s self-declared capital.

“Part of this is that these people are moving from vibrant cities like London or Paris. After a year of living in a place like Raqqa, they get tired of living without electricity and getting bombed all the time. They get bored, or they realize that the so-called caliphate is not what they were told it was.”

Analysts speculate that the problems have compelled the group to adopt new tactics, such as carrying out attacks abroad. That includes the Paris assaults in November that killed 130 people.

Attacks abroad may be an attempt to sustain the group’s narrative as always on the offense — which has been key for attracting potential militants. Even so, the Islamic State’s media narrative has shifted from a triumphant one to having to explain why it is losing so much, said Nelly Lahoud, an expert on political Islam at the International Institute for Strategic Studies who studies the group’s media.

“They overplayed their card at the beginning by describing their victories as a sign from God, a reward for their faith,” she said.

In October, the Islamic State announced a month-long amnesty for deserters, according to documents obtained and translated by Aymenn al-Tamimi, an expert on the Islamic State. He called the amnesty the “clearest sign” of the Islamic State’s troubles waging war.

According to activists with Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, the Islamic State is also forcibly recruiting more teenage boys in Syria to fight for the group.

Analysts and monitoring groups say they have observed more reports of the Islamic State executing fighters who deserted during recent battles against Kurdish peshmerga fighters in Iraq’s north and Iraqi forces in the city of Ramadi.

Reliance on such extreme measures “is a sure sign of low cohesion and a burned-out military force,” said Shapiro of Princeton.

Read more:

U.S. envoy goes to Syria to press the fight against the Islamic State

Inside the surreal world of the Islamic State’s propaganda machine

Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world

 

The Mosul Dam has been potential trouble for years and DAESH even threatened to blow it up. With it back in Iraqi forces hands hopefully they can shore it up in time.